Historicity of Muhammad

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Islamic prophet Muhammad

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The historicity of Muhammad concerns the historical authenticity of Muhammad. Some scholars advocate views that question the more general account presented by Muslim sources.

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[edit] Sources for the historical Muhammad

Two different types of sources on Muhammad's life are available:

  1. Muslim sources written in Arabic, which include the Qur'an and the oral accounts of Muhammad's life as written down by later Muslims.
  2. Non-Muslim sources written in Greek, Syriac, Armenian and Hebrew by the Jewish and Christian communities. [1]

Each of these has a certain intrinsic value and importance. The Qur'an is considered the most important source, while next in importance are the traditional accounts of Muhammad's life. Non-Muslim sources are valuable for corroboration of the Qur'anic and Muslim tradition statements. [2]

The Qur'an has some, though very few, casual allusions to Muhammad's life. [3] However,the Qur'an responds "constantly and often candidly to Muhammad's changing historical circumstances and contains a wealth of hidden data that are relevant to the task of the quest for the historical Muhammad." [4] The earliest surviving biographies are the two recensions of Ibn Ishaq's (d. 768) "Life of the Apostle of God", by Ibn Hisham (d. 834) and Yunus b. Bukayr(d.814-815). [4] According to Ibn Hisham, Ibn Ishaq wrote his biography some 120 to 130 years after Muhammad's death. Many, but not all, scholars accept the accuracy of these biographies, though their accuracy is unascertainable. [3] After Ibn Ishaq, the most widely used biography of Muhammad is that of al-Waqidi's (d. 822) and then Ibn Sa'd's (d.844-5). Al-Waqidi is often criticized by Muslim writers who claim that the author is unreliable.[4] It should be noted that these biographies are hardly biographies in the modern sense. The writers did not wish to record the life of Muhammad, but rather to treat Muhammad's military expeditions and to preserve stories about Muhammad, his sayings and the traditional interpretations of verses of the Qur'an.[4] The hadith collections, accounts of the verbal and physical traditions of Muhammad, date from several generations after the death of Muhammad. Western academics view the hadith collections with caution as accurate historical sources. [5]

There are few non-Muslim sources, according to S. A. Nigosian, which confirm the existence of Muhammad. None of these date back to before 634 CE and many of the interesting ones date to some decades later. The sources Nigosian cites confirm that Muhammad was a merchant and that his preaching revolved around the figure of Abraham. There are also confirmations of Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina. However, Nigosian also notes there are also some essential differences: some regarding chronology and some related to Muhammad's attitude towards the Jews and Palestine. [3]

[edit] Historical Authenticity of the Qur'an

All or most of the Qur'an was apparently written down by Muhammad's companions while he was alive, but it was then as now primarily an orally related document. The written compilation of the whole Qur'an in its definite form as we have it now was completed not many years after the death of Muhammad.[6] The Qur'an is widely regarded by Muslims to be that which issued from Muhammad's mouth from 610-632 A.D. F.E. Peters states, "Few have failed to be convinced that what is in our copy of the Quran is, in fact, what Muhammad taught, and is expressed in his own words... To sum this up: the Quran is convincingly the words of Muhammad, perhaps even dictated by him after their recitation" [7] Peters argues that "The search for variants in the partial versions extant before the Caliph Uthman’s alleged recension in the 640s (what can be called the “sources” behind our text) has not yielded any differences of great significance." In fact, the source of ambiguity in the quest for historical Muhammad in western academic circles is due to the uncertainty and the lack of knowledge about pre-Islamic Arabia. [7]

Patricia Crone and Michael Cook challenge the traditional account of how the Qur'an was compiled, writing that "there is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century." They also question the accuracy of some the Qur'an's historical accounts. Gerd R. Puin's study of ancient Qur'an manuscripts led him to conclude that the Qur'an is a "cocktail of texts", some of which may have been existent a hundred years before Muhammad. [8] However, while it is generally acknowledged that the work of Crone and Cook was a fresh approach in its reconstruction of early Islamic history, it has been dismissed as an experiment[9] and criticised for its "...use (or abuse) of its Greek and Syriac sources..."[10] Crone and Cook's controversial thesis is not widely accepted.[11]

There is considerable academic debate over the real chronology of the chapters of the Qur'an.[12] Carole Hillenbrand holds that there are several remaining tasks for the Orientalist Qur'anic scholars: Few Qur'anic scholars have worked on the epigraphy of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem whose foundation inscription dates to 72/692 and the antique Qur'an recently discovered in the Yemen, the Qur'an in the House of Manuscript in Sana'a. The Carbon-14 tests applied to this Qur'an date it to 645-690 AD with 95 percent accuracy. [12]

[edit] Historical Authenticity of the hadith literature

Western academics view the hadith collections with caution. Bernard Lewis states that "the collection and scrutiny of Hadiths didn't take place until several generations" after Muhammad's death and that "during that period the opportunities and motives for falsification were almost unlimited."[13] In addition to the problem of oral transmission for over a hundred years, there existed motives for deliberate distortion. Early Muslim scholars were also concerned that hadiths may have been fabricated, and thus developed a whole science of criticism to distinguish between genuine sayings and those that were errors or frauds. Modern historians point out that a chain of authorities may be easily forged and that rejection of some relators implies the victory of one thought over the others.[14] It is argued that by the time the oral traditions were being collected, the Muslim community had grown and also fractured into rival sects and different schools of thought and each sect and school had its own, sometimes conflicting, traditions of what Muhammad and his companions had done and said.

Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike agree that there are some inauthentic traditions concerning the life of Muhammad in the hadith collections. Thus most of these traditions are acknowledged by Muslim clerical authorities to be weak. There are quite a few which are considered reliable and are agreed upon by all Muslim scholars. A very small minority called the "Qur'an Alone Muslims" consider all hadith as unreliable.

[edit] Information on Muhammad

The neutrality and factual accuracy of this section are disputed.
Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page.

The word 'Muhammad' occurs only four times in the Qur'an. Karl-Heinz Ohling[15] comes to the conclusion that the person of Muhammed wasn't central to early Islam (up to the Ummayad caliphate) at all, and that at this very early stage Islam was in fact an Arabic Christian sect, which had objections to the concept of the trinity, and that the later hadith and biographies are in large part legends, instrumental in severing Islam from its Christian roots and building a full-blown new religion. Most biographies of Muhammad appear to be meant to add context to Qur'anic verses[16] [17]

[edit] Historical view

A translator of one of the works of Ibn Ishaq puts the historical view on Muhammad into words:

At face value we do know much about Muhammad, more than any other person from Antiquity. The oldest Muslims already discussed whether certain narrated stories truly happened or not. Many Muslims believe that the great number of traditions broadly draw the big picture of the Prophet. However, western scholars consider these sources not reliable any more. Newer orientalists don't believe that the factual story of the life of the Prophet can be reconstructed. We can say with certainty that he existed. (..)
Various facts and considerations have undermined the historicity of the sources. Hardly any source text is dated with certainty in the first century of Islam. Of many texts there are different versions that contain contradictory data. Non-Islamic source material, that sometimes can be dated very early gives another picture. [18]

The attempts to distinguish between the historical elements and the unhistorical elements has not been very successful and has not provided more reliable information about the person of Muhammad and the role he played in Islam. Harald Motzski therefore states:

At present, the study of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim community, is obviously caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, it is not possible to write a historical biography of the Prophet without being accused of using the sources uncritically, while on the other hand, when using the sources critically, it is simply not possible to write such a biography [19]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Islam, S. A. Nigosian, p.6 , Indiana University Press
  2. ^ Islam, S. A. Nigosian, p.7 , Indiana University Press
  3. ^ a b c Islam, S. A. Nigosian, p.6 , Indiana University Press
  4. ^ a b c d Encyclopedia of Islam, Muhammad
  5. ^ Lewis (1993), pp.33-34
  6. ^ The Cambridge History of Islam, p.32
  7. ^ a b Peters, F. E. "The Quest of the Historical Muhammad." International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3. (Aug., 1991), pp. 291-315.
  8. ^ Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, and Gerd R. Puin as quoted in Toby Lester. "What Is the Koran?", The Atlantic Monthly, January 1999.
  9. ^ van Ess, "The Making Of Islam", Times Literary Supplement, Sep. 8 1978, p. 998
  10. ^ Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History, (Princeton, 1991) pp. 84-85
  11. ^ (1997) Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, p. 47. 
  12. ^ a b Carole Hillenbrand, The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 1, p.329
  13. ^ Lewis (1993), pp.33-34
  14. ^ Peters (1991), pp.291-315
  15. ^ Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Der frühe Islam, 2007, ISBN 3-89930-090-4
  16. ^ Hans Jansen, De historische Muhammad. De Mekkaanse verhalen(The historical Muhammad, The Meccan stories), 2005, ISBN 90-295-6282-X. Reviews in the Dutch newspapers NRC, RD and Trouw
  17. ^ Karl-Heinz Ohlig & Gerd-R. Puin, Die dunklen Anfänge, 2005, ISBN 3-89930-128-5. Twelve scientist from different countries are expressing there doubts in different languages about the traditional story about the genesis of Islam.
  18. ^ Wim Raven, Introduction on a translation of Islamic texts into Dutch by Ibn Ishaq, Het leven van Muhammad (The life of Muhammad), ISBN 90-5460-056-X.
    For more information about the comparison between research on the historicity of Muhammad and Jesus and the problems researchers encounter, see for example F. E. Peters, The Quest of the Historical Muhammad, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3. (Aug., 1991), pp. 291-315, with many notes.
  19. ^ Quote from S. A. Nigosian, Islam: Its History, Teaching, and Practices, p. 6. ISBN 0-253-21627-3. Partially accessible via books.google.com

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